(Somehow our Cris got carried away and wrote two posts instead of one. We appreciate being carried away here at Caminoheads, that’s the thing. So I thought that I would post them together so we would have some continuity. Felipé.)

THEORIES PART 2

This part 2 should have been part 1, as in my mind, these reflections were the ones I wanted to share… but somehow, part 1 hijacked my mind and being late to my task, I sent what my fingers typed. However, part 2, started to linger in my mind as I was doing the spell-check or part 1… go figure!

In a few opportunities last year, we commented in some lines of David Whyte’s poem “What to remember when waking”, and for a reason all Caminoheads would understand, the lines below made so much sense:

“What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.”

A few days ago, the poem came up again in the facebook and I shared it with The Boss (aka Phil or Felipe). And contemporarily, E, a friend of mine wrote a wonderful prose about his experience of enlightenment he had when he stopped to reflect about the secret future and unknown potential of an acorn, when he sat under an oak tree in a summer afternoon.

In his writing, my friend wrote about this fact that nobody sees the tree, its roots so strong that makes such a big thing to stand still and strong despite winds, the shadow it will provide, the fruits the tree will give… it is rare that we think on all of that when looking at an acorn, because our limited minds not always can think beyond what we see.

And David Whyte’s lines came and go, came and go, as I was reflecting on my E’s lines. I am sure that if the acorn would see itself as an acorn, would not be able to “plan” to become an oak tree. How such a small thing could host such a life?

And potentially, this is true for all of us and our lives, and potentially all these challenging events we have in life.

When the poem came during the Veranda -1 Day, while I was sitting with Phil in the kitchen table in the ranch, we had no clue what the Veranda would be… and I was also highlighting to Phil, that I am sure he never planned that the acorn of Cancer would host inside such an amazing tree of Community, Meaning, Belonging, Camino, Goodness, etc. to him. (I certainly haven’t planned that commenting on Phil’s blog 3 years ago would host this tree of friendship and belonging, just to name some of the branches).

So, maybe, that is what the theory of “life distracting us” holds at its core: the “lot of things that start to go wrong all at once” would be the acorn… we are only focused on seeing the acorn, and we cannot see beyond it, but if we “slow down” and provide attention to the acorn even if the acorn is an unhappy thing, a painful life situation that we would never choose to deal with, if we are patient but curious, and just TRUST, a tree will start growing, solid thick roots also will be growing underneath to sustain us in the event of future winds, we will learn to flow through the seasons, and even in the bareness of the winters (that we will know for sure will come), we will still have the solid roots and the branches… Maybe that is the “something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born- and that needs us to be distracted so it can be born as perfectly as possible.”

As if our future is the tree, but to appreciate the tree, life needs to take us away from our small plans with these painful distractions…

It comes to my mind the lines from Mary Oliver in the poem “The uses of sorrow”:
“Someone I love once gave me a box full of darkness, it took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”

And maybe, these are all indeed one same theory, just each described with a different metaphor to accommodate to the understanding of the student.

Cris, CSABC